Lately I’ve been watching this reality show called Married at First Sight Australia. I could tell you that my girlfriend got me into it, and I wouldn’t even be lying, but this is the kind of thing men say to avoid acknowledging that they’ve been enjoying something they’re not really meant to enjoy. And I really am enjoying Married at First Sight Australia, or at least I was until I encountered Tommy.
If you haven’t seen Married at First Sight Australia, the gimmick of the show is summed up in the title. Every year we meet about a dozen couples, all of whom are supposedly here because they’re sick of modern dating, ghosting, situationships, etc. Instead, they’ve decided to try an arranged marriage organised by a TV production company called Endemol Shine. Like all good reality shows, MAFSA is relentlessly heteronormative. There are men and women. The women have all had various terrifying plastic surgeries to turn them into Pixar characters. They do skincare routines that leave their faces always looking slightly wet, like they’re still encased in their protective gel. If you cut into them they’d be skin-coloured and gummy-textured all the way through. The women are all relatively successful in life, business owners, high-powered professionals, but you get the sense that appearing on this show is their last-ditch effort, one final attempt at heterosexuality before they give up entirely. If it doesn’t work out they’ll spend the rest of their lives applying face masks and drinking rosé in their plush velvet Melbourne apartments, e-commerce anchoresses, peaceably alone. A surprising number of them have never had a serious relationship in their lives. Sometimes it’s because they’re obviously deeply mentally unstable, but most of the time it’s because they’re smart, smart enough to see through the attempted manipulations of the leery dullheaded Australian men that are their sexual peers, smart enough to know when someone is trying to drag them into a purgatorial realm of frequent but indifferent sex with no obligations attached, and smart enough to pick an evening with the face mask and the rosé instead. So they go on the show that promises to let them skip past all that bullshit, for the small price of turning themselves into mass entertainment.
That’s the women. The men are trickier. Men don’t watch stuff like MAFSA unless prodded into it by their girlfriends, and the one thing all the men on the show have in common is that they don’t have girlfriends. What kind of man ends up on a TV show that’s so fundamentally for women? Actually, there’s a very simple explanation. The men are on the show because they’ve noticed that if you go on there and manage to stick it out for a month or two, you will get one hundred thousand Instagram followers, and then you can spend the rest of your life doing sponsored content and making paid appearances at nightclubs on the Gold Coast. This is the source of the show’s dramatic tension. The producers help where they can, with a few gimmicky exercises to tear their couples apart—most marriages don’t involve the groom having to rank all of his wife’s friends by physical attractiveness—and I’m sure the editors are sneakily recutting everything that happens into a fantasy narrative that barely resembles actual events, but the real load-bearing simulation is performed by the cast themselves. The men have to keep up the impression that they’ve got a profound romantic chemistry with this woman they’ve just met. At the weekly dinner parties, the men brutally police each other for any slips. They’re all primly appalled when any other man seems to be disrespecting his wife. But over time, the mask inevitably slips. Almost all the couples stop having sex within the first few weeks. The women are left to slowly go crazy, trying not to recognise what they’ve secretly known all along: that this man they’ve been sharing a bed with simply does not care if they live or die.
But I think what keeps me watching this thing isn’t even so much the marriages at first sight as the Australia. There’s a British version of the show; it’s just not the same. British people are ugly. Our features are all squished together. Even with the plastic surgery we’re not gloriously synthetic like the Australians; we look like bog mutants. Inbred, floppy-lipped, small bitter eyes. The houses we live in are poky and cold. Our economy is contracting. Our skies are grey. Our island is small. Meanwhile Australia is, as far as I can tell, a kind of heaven, all green and lush and prosperous. Incredible that we used to send convicts there. Every so often British people get sick of being miserable and decide to move to Australia, and when you talk to them afterwards they’re almost giddy with it. Do you have any idea how much higher the salaries are here? And what you can get for the price of a mildewing flat in Deptford? And how nice it feels to live in a country that isn’t visibly going to the dogs? Yes, we do go surfing. We go surfing on Christmas. We eat huge thick steaks in our air-conditioned homes, in our golden philistine dreamworld on the opposite side of the planet, where people walk with their feet pointing up and their heads pointing down.
Australia hovered in the European imagination long before we ever set foot there. The Greeks and the Romans knew that the earth was round, and they could calculate what portion of the sphere was occupied by the world they knew: there must be something on the other side. A terra australis incognita. Pliny never doubted that it was inhabited. ‘We maintain that there are men dispersed over every part of the earth, that they stand with their feet turned towards each other, that the vault of the heavens appears alike to all of them, and that they, all of them, appear to tread equally on the middle of the earth. If anyone should ask why those situated opposite to us do not fall, we directly ask in return, whether those on the opposite side do not wonder that we do not fall.’ The Australians are our opposites, sitting under similar skies, making calculations. In the Chorographia of Pomponius Mela, he begins by pointing out that the earth has two inhabitable zones, layered between the two icy poles and the unbearable heat of the torrid equator. ‘The Antichthones inhabit one, we the other. The chorography of the former zone is unknown because of the heat of the intervening expanse, and the chorography of the latter is now to be described.’ He then spends the rest of his book talking about the world he knows, although he does speculate that the Nile might have its source in the other world, on the other side.
Christianity complicated things. For Christians, humanity has one origin, at Eden. Since Eden is somewhere in the northern hemisphere, and it’s impossible to pass through the deadly heat of the equator, the antipodes must be uninhabited. Augustine has no time for ‘the fable that there are antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible.’ Yes, the earth is a sphere, but ‘it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. For Scripture gives no false information, and it is too absurd to say that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other.’ Thomas Aquinas also rejected the antipodes. In his Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, he refutes the idea that a just God would not consign unbelievers to Hell when they’d never even heard the Gospel. He does this by simply insisting that everyone in the world has heard the Gospel, even in the furthest pagan lands, and rejected it. Even if someone were ‘brought up in the forest or among wolves,’ God would ‘send some preacher of the faith to him as he sent Peter to Cornelius.’ But since no one from the Christian world can reach the antipodes, God would not have put anyone there at all.
One interesting compromise was proposed by the Dominican friar Egbert of Hereford. Australia, he suggests, is a mirror of the known world, except that their sun rises when ours sets. When you go to sleep and dream, another version of yourself is waking up in Australia. His country is brighter than yours, animal symbols and primary colours. When he goes to sleep again you remember his life, just for a moment, and then it evaporates.
For centuries, despite the stern theological arguments of Augustine and Aquinas, Terra Australis Incognita continued to appear on maps and globes, pretty much exactly where Australia actually lies. We knew it was there, with a knowledge that drew from sources other than reason. And then, in the seventeeth century, we finally set eyes on the continent we’d been imagining for two millennia. It was real, and it was populated, by maybe the most fascinating people on earth. The Australians had split off from the rest of humanity more than fifty thousand years ago. They had sailed across palaeolithic oceans, long before anyone else had developed any kind of open-water navigation. As far as we know, when they set out humanity had yet to produce any representational art. We had not yet learned to create fire at will. Some of the more sophisticated flint-knapped tools had yet to be invented. But the Australians had boats. Then, once they arrived, they decided to forget all their impossibly advanced technology and never took to the seas again. In the time since then, as the rest of the world churned with constant migrations and population replacements, waves of farmers and pastoralists sweeping across the earth and exterminating each other, the Australians stayed exactly where they were. Across deserts and jungles and dozens of separate language families, they maintained a single pan-continental religious structure held together by the songlines that cross the land from coast to coast. The Australians believed in animal symbols. They believed that the world came out of a dream.
And then, in 1788, a group of people who, just yesterday, were wandering pastoralist herdsmen on the Russian steppes, intruded on that world at Botany Bay. They had come to this sacred place on the underside of the world because they wanted to use it as a prison for petty thieves. Within a millisecond, almost all the Australians were dead, and the Yamnaya herdsmen had built something else over their graves, a sunnier, dumber version of Britain thrown up on an imaginary continent, where they say things like ‘fair suck of the sav’ or ‘I’m not here to fuck spiders,’ and end their sentences with ‘hey,’ and throw prawns on the barbie, and marry each other at first sight.
Anyway, in the most recent season of Married at First Sight Australia we’re introduced to Tommy, 31. Tommy lives in Wollongong, New South Wales, where he works as a surf instructor. He has close-cropped blond hair and Polynesian tattoos all the way up to his jawline, and when he takes off his shirt roughly ten seconds into his introductory segment we can see that he also has a set of perfect, plastic, creatine abs. A silver cross dangles from his earring. People see me and they make all kind of assumptions, he says. But I don’t drink, I’ve never taken drugs, really I’m just a mummy’s boy. Shot of Tommy running out of the surf, whooping like a madman. It feels like modern dating is all about going to clubs, he says, getting pissed every night, I’m not about that. Shot of Tommy in the gym, lifting, then with his arm round another beautifully muscled man who is presumably his friend or maybe just someone the producers brought along.
One thing that’s unique about Tommy is that family is so important to him. We visit his mother’s bungalow in Albion Park. She is a very alarming woman to look at, partly because her flesh is lumpy and loose and folded so that she resembles a particularly inbred dog, and partly because she’s dressed like a clown. She’s wearing a diaphanous teal pierrot blouse and her hair in a purple bob. Big splotches of rouge on her cheeks. She seems like a nice person. She’s telling the cameras that her son’s always been the most perfect gentleman but if anything he dotes on her too much, so she hopes he finds a nice girl who might take him off her hands. She cackles. But at this point I’m not listening to her, because in amongst all the piled-up tat that crowds Tommy’s mum’s house I’ve caught a glimpse of something I recognise. I have to rewind and pause on exactly the right frame. It’s an oil painting, in profile, of a thuggish-looking man uncomfortably wrapped in a nineteenth-century suit. I’m sure I’ve seen this man, in relation to something I was reading about. He doesn’t look like a writer. I take a photo of the screen and reverse image search and yes, it is, it’s Jacob Mudie, the failed explorer. It’s the same portrait that illustrates his Wikipedia page. A bit of Googling reveals that yes, Tommy from MAFS is, in fact, the great-great-great-great-grandson of Jacob Mudie on his mother’s side.
Not many people remember the Mudie Expedition. We like hearing about tragic failures; sometimes we’ll settle for a success; the Mudie Expedition was neither. It is not particularly important in the history of Australia, but it does have a minor place in the history of madness.
The story goes that during the first phase of settlement in Australia, the European colonists kept to their fertile strip around the eastern edge of the continent, hemmed in by the Great Dividing Range and the vast dry bush beyond. They had the sea, which connected them to the rest of the world; that was what mattered. But in the 1850s, people started wrapping the world in copper wire. If Australia was going to thrive, it needed to be connected to the global telegraph network, and that would mean stringing a cable all the way across the interior of the continent, from the cities in the southeastern corner to the Top End near what’s now Darwin, and from there on to the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and the world. The man chosen to plot a route through the wilderness was a furious Scot named Jacob Mudie. Mudie had got his start as a surveyor in the Highlands during the Clearances, mapping out Hebridean crofts on behalf of Sir John Powlett Orde, Second Baronet Orde. There was a potato famine; the people were half-starved. Curious pattern of wounds and broken skin around the fingertips. Mudie’s job was to map the plots these people would shortly be losing, but something else happened while he was there, some incident with a daughter of Clan MacEachen; a limp body left on the grey shore among the heath flowers, bleeding into the surf. Mudie fled to Australia. He mapped out a claim in Djadjawurrung country, which happened to be the only plot of land in Victoria without a speck of gold in it. He continued to range and survey while his wife and two daughters chewed on warrigal greens and bark. Another incident. Some of the Djadjawurrung wandered onto his land to hunt and he laid them out flat on the ground for the Border Police. When the police sought out their camp, the womenfolk were all dead too, slumped over the fire, hair singed. His personal conduct was less than ideal, but Mudie was the man for the job. He could speak a few words of Wemba-Wemba and Barrabool, he could handle himself with the Brown Bess as well as he could a theodolite, and he was willing to walk out into the centre of Australia in return for a share in the telegraph company. In September 1857 he departed from Melbourne with six Irish porters and a train of donkeys, off into the interior.
He did not return in 1858, which is when he was expected. He also did not return in 1859. In 1860, the Royal Society of Victoria commissioned the much more extensive Burke and Wills Expedition, which set out with nineteen men, twenty-three horses, twenty-six camels driven by Pashtun camel-drivers shipped over from the fringes of British India, and two years’ worth of food. In 1861, three colonies sent out rescue expeditions to search for Burke and Wills, and ended up finding their bones. In 1862, five years after he set out, Jacob Mudie returned to Melbourne. Naked and sun-scorched, lines of livid red cracking open his back, lips black and gummy, nose shrivelled, mucous lining black, conjunctiva black, feet bursting with open sores. He was raving.
He had not reached the other shore; the Irish porters had all died and so had the donkeys, but he had walked across the desert to the dead centre of Australia, and in that centre he had found an inland sea. He’d even mapped it. But what really mattered wasn’t the sea. He had learned something in the outback. It had been revealed to him that as soon as Captain Cook had come ashore at Botany Bay, he said, he had fallen asleep and dreamed that he was walking around, surveying hills and harbours. And when the First Fleet arrived they had also fallen asleep, on the ground where they landed, under the open sky, dreaming that they were founding a colony. Then the Second Fleet came to sleep right next to them. From the start of the Gold Rush, boatloads of immigrants had been arriving in Port Phillip, all of them pouring out onto the soft green ground, and immediately collapsing into a deep, deep, motionless sleep. This city, Mudie said, is a dream, it’s a desert mirage, all Australia is a dream, we have trespassed on our dreamworld, and the only thing any white or Chinaman can do here is sleep! Mudie was confined in the Yarra Bend Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles. He took few visitors. Sometimes his wife would try to see him, and he would point in her face, all scornful, and say: Asleep. He died in 1882.
The map he produced, of the inland sea at the heart of Australia, is still in the archives of the Melbourne Museum. It’s drawn with precision. Calculations pencilled in the fringes. The coastline of his inland sea is rugged, fjorded; it follows the exact contours of the west coast of Scotland.
Jacob Mudie’s great-great-great-great-grandson is about to be married at first sight to Alyssa, 28, from Sydney. Alyssa is plastic, attractive, bottle-blonde, urn-shaped face, subtle fillers, mesomorph. She was born in Egypt but came to Australia when she was a baby. She works in market research, and the gimmick for her introductory segment is that it’s framed like she’s doing market research for herself as a romantic partner, but even though she has so much love to give no one wants a loyal woman with old-fashioned values any more. She has never had a serious long-term relationship in her life. She wants to be in love. One thing that’s unique about Alyssa is that family is so important to her. We see her phoning up her dad to tell him the good news. I’m getting married, she squeals. Her father is delighted. He wants to know everything. Who is the man? Where’s he from? Is he Coptic? How did they meet? Is he Coptic? Does he go to church? Is he Coptic? Well, says Alyssa, I haven’t actually met him yet. I’m going on MAFS. Mafs, says her dad, what is mafs? She tells him. There’s a long pause. No, he says. No, no, no, no, no.
Alyssa and Tommy are married in a little wooded dell overlooking Sydney Harbour. There’s a wedding arch made from fake white roses. Tommy breaks into a big grin when he sees her walking up the aisle. Wow, he says, you’re stunning, hey? Later the producers interview her under some eucalypts. He’s toooo handsome, she complains, like I’m just standing here like, how am I going to mess this up? I’m really freaking out now! You should have given me someone less handsome to take the pressure off! But later at the reception she suddenly breaks into tears. Two friends have come to her wedding, but all of her family have boycotted the event. This is my wedding, she keeps saying. I spent my whole childhood dreaming of this day. I never ever imagined my family wouldn’t be here. Tommy tries to comfort her. I’m sorta your family now, hey? he says, and puts an arm over her shoulder. She screams and flicks his hand off of her like it’s an enormous spider, and sinks back into her tears. They do not have sex on their wedding night.
For their honeymoon, the pair are sent to a wellness retreat in the desert outside Alice Springs, right in the centre of Australia. Stone Buddha heads, gravel raked into a yin and yang. We see them lying in shivasana, but Tommy keeps poking Alyssa in the shoulder while she tries not to laugh. They go for a dip in Ellery Creek and Tommy shrieks at the cold. Ooh, my little fella’s curled right up! he says. Later we see them over dinner. The musical score mocks Tommy as he insists on saying grace over their pad ka prow. Lord, he says, thank you for this food you have given us from your bounty, and thank you for bringing me my beautiful wife Alyssa, so we can honour your commandments… Alyssa side-eyes the camera. Cut to Alyssa, talking head. I mean, I’m Christian, she says. But Tommy’s like, Christian Christian. Back to the table. Can we eat now? says Alyssa. But Tommy’s still going. He’s asking God to look after his mother while he’s away in the NT. And then he asks God to check in on Alyssa’s parents too, and prays that He’ll remove the scales from their eyes so they’ll accept him as their son-in-law. He thinks he’s just delivered a coup. Alyssa smiles, weakly. Cut to talking head. That is honestly just so, so disrespectful, she says. Don’t talk about my family, ok? Don’t talk about them to your mates, don’t talk about them to your mum, and don’t you dare talk about my family to God. They do not have sex on the first night of their honeymoon.
On the second day they go for a hike out in the desert. Creepy jagged rock formations peering over the spinifex plains. Ghost gums twisting spindly between the sun-blackened stones. Tommy’s wearing a cork hat. He thinks it’s hilarious. He keeps making little jokes to Alyssa and she barely responds. You know what, he says suddenly, [bleep] this. I tried, alright? I really tried. He suddenly starts marching away from her. Intensely dramatic music, epic fantasy battle music. Cut to steadicam footage as one of the cameramen tries to follow him. Just [bleep] off, Tommy says, and breaks into a run. He’s very fit. Cut to night. Alyssa’s back at the resort. She’s crying. I scared him off, she said, this is what I always do, I drive people away. Meanwhile helicopters are in the air, searchlights on, looking for Tommy in endless miles of empty outback. Somewhere out there, Tommy is falling into the infinite centre of everything. They do not have sex on the second night of their honeymoon.
He returns the next day. I just needed time to clear my head, he tells the camera. He says that while he was gone he gained the clarity he needed, and now he’s ready to really commit to his relationship with Alyssa. But he seems different; there’s a new interior distance in him. Something as endless as the desert seems to stare out through his eyes. The camera follows Tommy as he bounds up to the suite and knocks on the door. Alyssa opens. Pale without her makeup. She doesn’t seem surprised to see him. You came back, she said. Yeah, says Tommy. He grabs a beer out the minibar and sits down heavily on the sofa. A small cloud of dust rises off his body. Alyssa doesn’t say anything. That night, Tommy and Alyssa have sex for the first time.
They move into a sleek, velvet, neutral-toned apartment in Sydney. Now it’s been consummated, Alyssa seems incredibly enthusiastic about their marriage. She keeps calling him hubby, hubbo, sometimes hubbs. He’s speaking less and less. The first argument happens while they’re still unpacking. Alyssa picks up their wedding photo and says she wants to put it by her bedside. Tommy is folding tshirts while staring straight ahead. His eyes seem to be tunnelling down into his skull. Sure, he says. This makes Alyssa upset, because she thinks he ought to want to put the photo on his bedside. I keep giving you these opportunities to show up for me, she says, to let me know you care about me, and all you do is go uh, yeah, sure. Different people show up in different ways, says Tommy. But I’m asking you to show up for me in the way I need you to show up for me, says Alyssa. Yeah, well I’m not a mind reader, hey? says Tommy. You don’t need to be a mind reader, says Alyssa, you just need to stop deflecting and let me feel heard, and if I feel heard then you’ll know how to show up for me! Right, says Tommy, so how do you want me to show up for you? I want, says Alyssa. She takes a few deep breaths. I want you to show up for me, she says, by making space for my feelings when I need to feel heard. Tommy tries to hug her and she bats him in the head with a flip-flop.
At the first dinner party Tommy wears an oversized white suit jacket with blue chinos and a blue string vest. Alyssa is loosely wrapped in a kind of large lime-green taffeta ribbon. During the dinner, Craig starts laying into Tommy. You’ve got a beautiful, stunning woman there, he says, but I can tell she’s not being shown up for. Tommy and Alyssa are one of the two major dramas of the evening; the other is that Craig was caught texting his ex during his own honeymoon in Fiji. But now the spotlight’s on Tommy, Craig is making a meal of it. I can’t imagine walking out on this gorgeous, beautiful woman, literally walking out on her into the desert, he says. That’s not how a man shows up. Clara, Craig’s sharp-nosed wife, sits next to him wearing a look of undisguised rage as he keeps piling compliments on Alyssa. But Tommy isn’t there. He’s walking naked along the Bulloo Creek, with six dead Irishmen slung over the backs of the donkeys that plod after him. He’s learned that the desert has a voice, just not one you can detect with your ears. It teaches you things and then you know them, in the same way that there are things you simply come to know in a dream. The desert told him to take off his clothes. You can not be one with the desert while you still wear your clothes. And once you obey, the desert will be kind to you. It has shown him food. Tommy is gnawing on a thighbone of Irishman and marching naked up the Bulloo Creek to meet his destiny.
Alyssa has a difficult time at the commitment ceremony. Beforehand she’s talking to the cameras about how she’s going to air all her grievances about the way Tommy’s been mistreating her, but before it’s her turn Clara starts accusing Alyssa of trying to tempt Craig away from her, which means Alyssa now has to pretend that everything’s actually going great between her and Tommy, make a show of being all loved up in her new relationship, but the other couples aren’t buying it. Oh babe, says Joanee, he literally abandoned you in the desert, if my husband did that I’d never forgive him. Alyssa laughs, throwing her hair back, like it’s no big deal. We had some problems, yeah, she says. But when he came back he really committed to me, he’s really shown that, I feel like we’re in such a good place right now. Tommy sits staring at nothing. He’s in the flaking eczema scrublands north of Kati Thanda, where salt hollows scar the land under a world-devouring sun. Tommy, says one of the experts, do you think you’re in a good place right now? Yes, says Tommy. The desert is a mirror. I’m in a good place, he says.
Austen says she thinks Alyssa is being gaslit. I don’t feel like I’m being gaslit, says Alyssa. No but you are, says Austen, he’s gaslighting you so much you don’t even realise you’re being gaslit. I really don’t think that’s true, says Alyssa. Yeah, says Austen, but babe that’s not what you actually think, it’s what he’s making you think, he’s literally putting those thoughts inside your head.
Afterwards Tommy and Alyssa have to reveal the cards on which they’ve written whether they want to stay with each other, and on the show, or quit. Alyssa has written STAY. She’s drawn a little heart next to it. I’ve sacrificed so much to be here, she says, and I want to prove that it’s possible for anyone of any background to take that step, to be brave and put yourself out there, so I’m staying. Next Tommy shows his card to the camera. It says SLEEP. You’ve written sleep, says the expert. Can you tell me what you meant by that? Alyssa’s inched away from him on the sofa. Why did you write that? she says. What does it mean? What does it mean? Tommy’s face is motionless. We’re asleep, he says. He’s looking straight at the camera. There’s a mineral glint in his eyes.
Everywhere in the world except Australia, reality comes out of some conscious act of creation. Yahweh Elohim sits in his throne of storm-clouds and decrees: Let there be light. In Australia, there’s the Dreaming. A lustrous, hazy, eternal present lying just beneath the surface of every individual moment, where the ancestral spirits wander the formless land and give it shape. This gorge is a footprint being left by Emu in the Emu Dreaming. This waterhole is where he digs. Here Emu is wounded by Eagle and he thrashes around in the dirt, and that creates Kati Thanda. You can track Emu’s path across the country, see where it intersects with the Eagle Dreaming, the the Dingo Dreaming, the Porcupine Dreaming, the Kangaroo Dreaming. These mountains are Emu where he finally lays down and dies, but there’s a dark cloud in the Milky Way that is also Emu, pacing between the stars. Every time is the dream time. Tommy is also in a dream, walking across the land and giving it shape. The thin stark telegraph line will lacerate the earth wherever he sets his foot. New electronic songlines unspool behind him. He is walking the Telegraph Dreaming. The Information Dreaming. The Communications Dreaming. The Reality TV Dreaming.
Since Alyssa has decided to stay, the couple have one more week on the show to try to work things out. This week is Intimacy Week. Alyssa is having an intimacy workshop with the other girls. The other girls are all very slightly frosty to her; they’ve decided she’s complicit in her own gaslighting. Meanwhile Alyssa keeps giggling at the sex toys. I don’t think I’m, like, fully comfortable with my sexual side yet, she tells the camera. One of the experts reminds her that intimacy is not the same as sex. It’s about two people learning to be present and comfortable and vulnerable with one another. For her task, she has to sit facing Tommy, holding hands with him, gazing into his eyes, and ask him four prepared questions about himself. What do you like about me? What makes you nervous? Were you happy as a child? When was the last time you cried, and why? Tommy considers these. What do I like about you, he says. Well first of all you’ve got a stunning body, that’s number one. Number two, I think you’ve got really great values, like family’s so important to you. Number three… His jaw rotates soundlessly for a moment. Cut to Alyssa’s impatient face, waiting. What makes me nervous, Tommy says. Flying, he says. I always get heaps scared when I’m on a flight. Cut to desaturated footage of Tommy on his honeymoon flight to Alice Springs, chattering happily away. Alyssa is looking furious. Did I have a happy childhood, says Tommy. Flashes of a crofter’s hovel in the boglands. A happy childhood, he manages again. He is being whipped across the knuckles with a length of heather rope, until all the skin has shredded away. Suddenly a wet howl bursts out of Tommy’s mouth. Alyssa swoops in to cradle his head. It’s ok, she says as he cries hot tears into her dress, you’re safe, I’ve got you, you can tell me when you’re ready.
I feel like we made a really big breakthrough today, she tells the camera later.
That night Tommy has sex with his wife again. His haunches move like a piston, well-oiled, engineered, and she lies face-down on the bed going unf, unf, unf. He is pushing into the red centre of her body, deeper, deeper, in. The wet polymorphous worldbearing womb. Tommy has walked all the way into the heart of the desert but as far as he walks the centre he’s after keeps trailing away from him. He ate his porters and he ate the donkeys, even after the meat went rancid. Some of the mobs have fed him and some of the mobs he shot. He smears one hand all over Alyssa’s face. Grinding hard into the cleft of her arse. Deeper and deeper into the guts of Australia until finally the fundament opens and where there had been one parched and endless desert he’s now standing naked on a hillside above a slate-grey island-speckled sea.
It’s different here, on the secret sea. Around Tommy’s feet the spinifex fades to gorse, yellower maybe, but it’s the yellow of old film, colours bleeding dimmer. Yellow of lichen, old newspapers, discoloured teeth. A few purple heath flowers below the cliffs by the sea. There are two black figures down there, naked aboriginals, a man and a woman, hand in hand, picking their way with some difficulty over the cold and slimy rocks. He is aware that their names are Man and Woman. Eventually Man stops his clambering and just steadies himself with his spear, watching Woman as she struggles on ahead. Once there’s a bit of distance between them he balances the spear in his woomera and flings it. The spear falls like a raindrop, right through Woman’s body. She lies on the grey shore among the heath flowers, bleeding into the surf. Tommy is erect. He walks down to the shore, which is sandy now, a big broad beach under sandy cliffs with bungalows on top. Sandon Point, Wollongong. Waves look ace. He kneels over the dying Woman and plugs up her wound. He understands it all. It’s still the show; he’s dreaming about the show. They say the whole world came out of a dream. That makes perfect sense. Everyone knows what dreams, once you strip away the metaphors, are really all about.
Anyway, at the start of the next episode, they showed a few brief shots of Tommy and Alyssa’s empty apartment while the narrator explained that Tommy had to be hospitalised after a medical emergency and would not be returning to the show. According to the Daily Mail, Tommy is currently in an acute psychiatric unit at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Alyssa spent two nights in a trauma ward at the same hospital before being discharged. According to the Mail, she has chosen not to press charges. It was a very sudden end to one of the more promisingly dysfunctional couples on the show, but to be honest I was glad not to have to see them any more. There was something worrying about Tommy and Alyssa, and it wasn’t just Tommy’s increasingly odd behaviour. Like I said at the start, it made me enjoy the show a lot less. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it had to do with the way they were presented; my whole viewing experience felt different when I was watching them. For instance, there was one part near the end where I definitely remember seeing Tommy and Alyssa having sex. All the lights were on in their plush millennial-grey bedroom, this really cold white light, almost institutional, and I could see Alyssa’s red cheeks and the red circles on her slapped arse and Tommy’s stubbly thighs pumping back and forth, all looking grimly desaturated in that light, totally unerotic, like so many piles of sausages. There wasn’t any narration. There wasn’t any music. It lasted for a really long time. I guess it was a kind of glimpse into the reality behind reality TV, without any of the usual manipulative editing or the musical cues that sustain the narrative fantasy and tell you how to feel about it. Except I find it hard to believe that Tommy and Alyssa would have allowed the cameras in there with them, or that a long stark sequence of Tommy emotionlessly fucking Alyssa doggy style would have been cleared for broadcast. To be honest, while I can remember that sequence I don’t remember watching it on a screen. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t on my sofa in London when it happened. I wasn’t watching TV. I wasn’t grounded in anything physical at all. Where was my girlfriend? The person who got me into this show in the fist place? My own dreamy heterosexual idyll? Dissipated. Sunk back into the sea that birthed her. And this actually happened quite a lot, whenever Tommy was onscreen: I’d find myself disembodied, watching, knowing certain things about where he was or what he was thinking, even when those things didn’t really make sense. So in a way I was glad when it was over, even though it’s obviously awful that Alyssa had to go to hospital. Afterwards the episode continued pretty seamlessly. Justin and Joanee are on the rocks after Joanee accuses Justin of disrespecting her sister. Chardonnay admits she’s been flirting with one of the other grooms. Shots of traffic moving over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Skyscrapers and eucalyptus trees. The sun’s always shining over there. Eventually I grew tired. I went to sleep, and dreamed about Australia.